Stanley Carlson-Thies

March 3, 2016

In a “comment” on proposed regulations for the federal child care funding program, IRFA recommended three changes so that the funding will be fully open to the wide range of providers favored by diverse American families. The child care funding program was carefully designed in 1990 to maximize parental choice and the involvement of faith-based providers. The draft regulations proposed last Christmas Eve, however, if not changed, will reduce choice.

IRFA’s comment stresses that the proposed regulations (announced by a Notice of Proposed Rule Making, NPRM) directly violate a key requirement of the law Congress passed in 2014 to reauthorize the federal childcare funding program (the Child Care and Development Program—CCDF). To ensure parent choice and the inclusion of faith-based providers, the federal program from the start has directed states, when they receive the federal dollars, to prioritize child-care certificate, a form of vouchers, over grants and contracts. With certificates, parents choose which provider will care for their children, and faith-based organizations can receive the federal dollars without needing to strip away religious elements of their program and ignore religion when selecting staff. The vast majority of child-care funding is paid for via certificates and fewer than half of the states use grants or contracts at all.

However, with the rationale that states can more easily promote quality improvements and the development of specialized child care services (such as after-hours care) if they use grants and contracts (more government control) than certificates (more parental control), the administration in 2013 proposed draft regulations requiring every state to use at least some grants or contracts. This requirement was specifically rejected by the 2014 reauthorization law, which specifically states that none of the quality and other improvements that are to be achieved justifies promoting grants and contracts over certificates.

And yet, the NPRM published last December again includes a requirement that every state use some grants or contracts. IRFA pointed to the design of the program and to the language in the 2014 law to object to this anti-diversity and anti-FBO change.

IRFA’s comment, second, proposed that the draft regulations be modified to encourage inclusion of the whole range of voices and approaches in the drive for increased quality and a wider variety of services. Child care services and early childhood education can be and are offered in a range of ways that are qualitatively different. The NPRM acknowledges this, pointing out, for example, that care offered in “faith-based settings”is distinctive and specifically valued by some parents. And yet the regulations that are proposed to push states to intensify their quality improvement efforts, to encourage better education of child care staff, and to solicit the best advice on how to coordinate and improve services do not press states to be inclusive of the many different varieties of care and education. The importance and value of an inclusive—diverse—approach is stressed in the comment submitted by the Council for American Private Education (CAPE), an education association with a very diverse membership. IRFA’s comment recommended the changes CAPE proposed. That would mean adding, in a dozen or more places in the regulations, a phrase such as “including those with distinctive approaches to early childhood education and care, such as faith-based, Montessori, and Waldorf programs.”

Finally, IRFA proposed a significant change to the proposed (and existing) regulations. Despite the stress from the beginning on parental choice, and a valuable draft new regulation proposing that states, when they design their child care information and referral resources, should include information about the “full range of child care options,”including faith-based providers, the basic data in the CCDF system does not fully acknowledge this dimension of choice. The current regulations include a subsection entitled “Parental choice,”but in listing the kinds of choices parents should have, the categories are limited to what we might call “functional”varieties: is the child care provided in a day care center, or in a home, etc. The actual range of parent choice would be better described, IRFA’s comment proposes, if the “variety”of care is also highlighted—including faith-based, Montessori, or Waldorf.

The comment period closed on February 22, 2016. IRFA’s comment was joined by the Child Development Education Alliance (CDEA), a Florida-based network that promotes high-quality Christian early childhood programs. CDEA and other organizations worked with the Florida government to ensure that the state designed its program to strengthen the quality of child care and early childhood services in a way that accommodates a variety of perspectives, including faith-based services.